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Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

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Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at 2.9G virtual 1.277g resident with about 130 tabs open (yeah, I'm a goofball but I like my tabs). It's pretty responsive on a thinkpad x220 i5-2540M @ 2.6ghz, 8G of ram and an SSD.

Not even criticizing, but how do you manage 130 tabs? How do you find tabs you're looking for? You must have some kind of system!

A few people use Tree-Style Tabs, which organize them as a tree structure, similar to directories. It encourages using tabs instead of bookmarks, which have a terrible UX (in all browsers, not picking on Firefox here).

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you mean the interpreter should be mathematically proven like SEL4 and generated from the proof? Otherwise I have no idea what "secure in the first place" means.

My point is that defense in depth is not all that great if the breach of the first line already gives you access to the loot. So you shouldn't assign too much weight to it.

The point of defense in depth is that you should not rely solely in practice on a single defense element, but you still should strive the hardest when you design it to be sufficient if it was bug free (at least on points where it is possible given the security model, and what the technical item can address).

So splitting everything in sandboxed processes can play a big part in the security in a defense in depth approach. Of course you are not going to call it a day with just that, but still, it's extremely significant.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#173
post #19

“We can learn from the competition,” said Dotzler. “The way they implemented multi-process is RAM-intensive, it can get out of hand. We are learning from them and building an architecture that doesn’t eat all your RAM.” That's the money quote here. I've been waiting for this for a long time actually. Every browser I've tried except Firefox just basically eats all my RAM and other app performance (e.g. compiling stuff…

I'm not a Firefox user, but considering that 95% of the time about half my RAM is going unused (well, Windows uses it for pre-caching random stuff it thinks I might need), I don't mind high memory usage as long as I get a benefit for it. If it's just inefficient, that's a different story.

The thing is HD caching is extremely elastic. Memory consumption by a browser, less so (maybe even nearly not at all elastic).

So what you might think of a benefit one day might be a drawback the next if you want to open twice the same amount of tabs, or run a big build in the background.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm also a little surprised there hasn't been an attempt to launch a completely new Firefox from the ground up. Check out Servo: https://servo.org/

Servo is "just" a new rendering engine, though, not a whole browser.

Well, it is for now. This isn't yet a concrete plan that Mozilla has, but from what I've read, the Servo developers would definitely also like to write a JavaScript-engine in Rust, simply because of the gain in security.

Also, browser.html already exists in an early form (and is bundled with Servo). It provides a new UI written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so it can be rendered by Servo as well.

https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#176
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're getting worse at a linear pace, while hardware improves exponentially. Effectively that's a pretty good improvement each year.

Hardware does not get exponetially better. Maybe it did in 90ties and 00ers. Right now hardwardware gets slimmer, less power consuming and cheaper. But not better. My 12 year old (then mid-end gaming pc) is pretty much exactly as fast as my current, 2(?) year old office machine. (x264 and other mulit-threaed cpu benchbmarks) But it costs a fraction and uses next to no energy. /edit: Yes this is wrong. I made a mistak…

That's impossible. My 200$ is faster than your 12 year old computer.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#177
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're getting worse at a linear pace, while hardware improves exponentially. Effectively that's a pretty good improvement each year.

Hardware does not get exponetially better. Maybe it did in 90ties and 00ers. Right now hardwardware gets slimmer, less power consuming and cheaper. But not better. My 12 year old (then mid-end gaming pc) is pretty much exactly as fast as my current, 2(?) year old office machine. (x264 and other mulit-threaed cpu benchbmarks) But it costs a fraction and uses next to no energy. /edit: Yes this is wrong. I made a mistak…

That's impossible. My 200$ phone is faster than your 12 year old computer.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#178
post #19

“We can learn from the competition,” said Dotzler. “The way they implemented multi-process is RAM-intensive, it can get out of hand. We are learning from them and building an architecture that doesn’t eat all your RAM.” That's the money quote here. I've been waiting for this for a long time actually. Every browser I've tried except Firefox just basically eats all my RAM and other app performance (e.g. compiling stuff…

If you're on Mac, Safari is good in terms of both memory and cpu.

And battery life.

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#179
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're getting worse at a linear pace, while hardware improves exponentially. Effectively that's a pretty good improvement each year.

Hardware does not get exponetially better. Maybe it did in 90ties and 00ers. Right now hardwardware gets slimmer, less power consuming and cheaper. But not better. My 12 year old (then mid-end gaming pc) is pretty much exactly as fast as my current, 2(?) year old office machine. (x264 and other mulit-threaed cpu benchbmarks) But it costs a fraction and uses next to no energy. /edit: Yes this is wrong. I made a mistak…

An extremely low-energy atom, that runs at half the frequency might have about the same performance as a top-of the line 12-year old Pentium 4, but that's not a meaningful comparison in my eyes, considering that we still have high-end gaming PCs today.

A 11 year old Pentium 4 @3.4GHz has a passmark score of 401. A modern 2-core $40 Celeron G1840 @2.80GHz has a passmark score of 2984. And that's among the cheapest processors you can get as end-user.

1: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+4+3.4...

2: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+G1840...

Re: Multi-process Firefox brings 400-700% improvement in responsiveness

#180
post #7

I switched to Firefox from Chrome about 12 months ago. It isn't as good as Chrome, but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies. It has been mostly fine (except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing). I was really looking forward to this feature to help close the gap on Chrome performance. Until August (I think Firefox 48.x), when it became unusable on any site with... something. I'…

I have this exact same problem, in fact I could have written your comment word-for-word. I also cannot reproduce it reliably, but it started in August. I also switched from Chrome, but for slightly different reasons...I got to thinking about Google, and Chrome,and ad-blocking, and it occurred to me that Chrome will probably never allow extensions on Android, not because it's technically not possible, but because ad-b…

Based on CAF Chromium, with integrated ad-blocker and DuckDuckGo as an search option : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mokee.yubr...
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